A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning [Mass Market Paperback]

Gretel Ehrlich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1995

"Before electricity carved its blue path toward me, before the negative charge shot down from cloud to ground...before air expanded and contracted producing loud pressure pulses I could not hear because I was already dead, I had been walking." So opens Gretel Ehrlich's absorbing account of being struck by lightning. Only when she fell to the ground, her head and body hitting on rock, was she jolted back to consciousness, back to life. In this astonishing chronicle of her experience and of the physical, psychological, and spiritual consequences of the encounter, the author turns her acute naturalist's eye on herself and on the natural world of the body to understand exactly what happened when lightning struck her. Woven into the narrative of her recovery is an examination of the heart - medical, religious, and cultural: There is the path of healing that she traveled not only with the requisite cardiologist but, to quite amazing effect, with her dogs as well. And finally, there is water, and the ways in which, in its contemplation and its immersion, she learned how fire can be extinguished. A Match to the Heart is a stunning work of observation and synthesis: bringing together the most minute self-exploratory and an enlarging, illuminating vision of the world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'While Frameworks of Power is ostensibly directed at scholars in organization studies, it clearly has a much wider domain, addressing concerns pivotal to social theory as a whole. Clegg provides insightful and evocative critiques of the standard debates on power' - Communication Theory 'Clegg provides a useful textbook discussion of the modern literature and draws from it an ingenious model of his own' - Political Studies 'should be widely adopted as a teaching text: no alternative is so up-to-date, or so adept in identifying and interpreting recent developments' - Sociology 'It is to our benefit that Stewart Clegg has laboured so assiduously to bring clarity and lucidity to [the] concept [of power]... the book presents and addresses a multiplicity of debates around power, particularly those which have taken place in English-speaking regions in the 20th centruy. Yet it is more than this, it is also a developed theoretical statement, an attempt to enunciate and illustrate a particular framework of power around the idea of 'circuits' of power. Clegg's knowledge and exposition of the field are extremely thorough and border on the prodigious... the range of themes is itself extraordinary.' - Prometheus 'a particularly clear and incisive survey of the field, and a stimulating and important contribution to the on-going debate over the nature of power... As well as the carefully argued writing style in the analytical tradition, there are passages of a different writing... [that] suggest that Clegg took pleasure in the writing. All power to his keyboard. The result is a book that we and our students can approach with the expectation that we will not only benefit from it, but enjoy the read' - APROS Bulletin 'an ambitious book, spanning the theoretical issues of sociology from the most micro to the most macro dimensions of analysis. Clegg integrates the theory of power with the sociology of organizations, and shows us the relationships among social cognition, class structure, organizational processes and historical change. Clegg's work is on the frontier of current thinking in the social sciences' - Randall Collins, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Riverside 'Comprehensive and systematic, Stewart Clegg has given us a masterly survey of theories of power, from Machiavelli to postmodernism... it is a major contribution to contemporary social theory' - Bryan S Turner, University of Utrecht 'This is just what I was looking for: a thorough, balanced, and above all, readable account of the central concept of politics which takes us from Hobbes through all the major writers to Foucault. It is an admirably clear statementof the classics, and an attempt to go beyond them. It will immediately go in the 'Essential Reading' part of my graduate and undergraduate course lists' - Professor Kenneth Newton 'brilliant... fills a gap in the sociological literature... the theoretical framework is especially relevant to redefine the sociological debate' - Professor Lucien Karpik, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, l'Ecole des Mines 'This important book reopens the debate about power in modern society. The book starts where Steven Lukes and Anthony Giddens left the controversy several years ago, but Clegg redirects the debate, by reconceptualizing power as an organizational phenomenon. Organization provides the 'framework of power', and without knowledge of this framework power cannot be adequately conceptualized. As such, this book invigorates both the debates on power and the entire field of organizational studies. - Gary G Hamilton, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Davis 'A distinctive, even outstanding, consideration of power, remarkably informed and thoughtful... bringing together European and American thinking past and present.' - Professor David J Hickson, University of Bradford 'a comprehensive analysis of the various discussions of power in current social theory and criticism. This book should be of substantial interest to communication scholars' - Quarterly Journal of Speech 'most impressive. Using the giants of the past - Hobbes and Machiavelli - as a starting point, Clegg presents an integrated framework with the giants of the present - Giddens and Lukes. In the process, Clegg makes some important original contributions to the development and use of concepts related to power' - Richard Hall, Professor of Sociology, SUNY Albany 'the book not only provides an interesting and readable discussion of major texts on power in social theory, but also provides an interesting framework for the analysis of power that deserves further attention.' - Accounting, Auditing and Accountability 'In Frameworks of Power, he apparently sets himself an almost impossible task. He attempts to produce a work that is both a comprehensive historical and theoretical overview of the concept of power, and a substantive and original contribution to debates in that literature. However, Clegg has succeeded remarkably well on both counts. First, his book is a wide-ranging and nuanced overview and critique of theories of power stretching from Hobbes to Foucault. Second, Clegg spends the last third of the book presenting an alternative conception of power that is both theoretically sophisticated and powerfully insightful...While Frameworks of Power is ostensibly directed at scholars in organization studies, it clearly has a much wider domain, addressing concerns pivotal to social theory as a whole. Clegg provides insightful and evocative critiques of many of the standard debates on power, although his reading of Gidden's structuration theory should be of particular interest to communication scholars.' - Communication Theory --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140179372
• ISBN-13: 978-0140179378
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #229,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Read and learn, August 22, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning (Mass Market Paperback)

I chose to read this book simply because I've enjoyed Ehrlich's style and prose previously. I did not expect to learn so much about human physiological response to electrical injuries, and how unknowledgable and unresponsive the medical community is to those persons who suffer such injuries. This is an excellent source book for persons who have suffered electrical injury,for both the description of the vagarities of symptoms, with Medicine's inability to measure such injures by traditional testing, and for the reassurance offered by naming victim support groups. As a medical professional, I have offered this book to several persons who have suffered electrical injury, and it has helped them cope.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A book about a physical and spiritual journey., February 16, 2003

By 

John Hartnett - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning (Mass Market Paperback)

In this book, Ehrlich uses many different techniques that all work together to make a good book. Basic ground rules of writing command us to ?show, don't tell? and keep the reader as involved as possible in the story. In general, Ehrlich uses special techniques where the story of her journey might become too abstract, too metaphysical, or too obtuse, or too personal to sustain us as readers. Here are a few techniques I found interesting.

If I understand Ehrlich's intent, this is a book about a journey. But the journey isn't just a physical journey (Wyoming to California to North Carolina to California then back to Wyoming), it's also a spiritual, religious and emotional journey. In this sense then, this is partly a book about ideas.

Interestingly, Ehrlich does not begin the book with a big set of ideas. She begins in the present tense, a voice and tense of intimacy and immediacy. She places us at the beginning in a dream or a dreamstate she experienced at the moment of the lightning strike. It seems to me, this sets Ehrlich up nicely to deal with the potential problems of a ?talky, head-game? narrative. My guess is she knows she's got a long journey ahead of her, filled with speculation, thoughts, feelings, readings, science facts, and what not, so she looks for devices to keep the narrative grounded and interesting. Her first technique is the present tense opening. Another technique she uses is to concentrate her details on the natural world. Although we learn about the physics of lightning, Ehrlich spends countless paragraphs describing every species of plant and animal one can encounter in California or Wyoming. With such a heavy dose of color, shape, sound and smell details I never encounter the accumulated feeling that I am too much absorbed in the narrator's head.

Ehrlich's attention to the sensory details around her help us trust her as a narrator on subjects we don't understand. We trust her when she tells us how kelp smell, how fish look and feel, how the birds fly, the feeling of snow between her toes. Likewise, when she tells us something about lightning, about it's electrical charge, about the currents it follows, or tells us something about Tibetan philosophy, we believe her. Her credibility as an observer of nature carries over to her explanation of abstract or unobservable phenomenon. This makes the whole story much more believable, richer, and more concrete to us readers.

In one section, Ehrlich talks about a legend she read about a lighting victim always being thirsty. In the next paragraph she switches to a scenic description of her filling water bottles because she's always thirsty. She goes on to cite some more similarities between her situation and the legend she read. This works to her advantage as a credible narrator because now, in other places, I will subconsciously project the description of other legends onto her.

In Chapter 24, Ehrlich comes right out and tells us why the book is structured the way it is. She says it is shaped like a convection cloud, and that inside the narrative would zigzag like lightning. When I read this page, I admit it did make the structure of the book clearer to me, but I have to admit I don't like it. First of all, she says she dreamed this. I don't believe it. It seems incredible that in the middle of this search for peace and health, she would dream about the structure of a book. This bothers me most because, now I doubt all her dreams. When is she really dreaming and when is she dreaming for the convenience of putting something interestingly metaphysical at just the right place in the book.

By contrast, the surgery scene is told mostly in straightforward scene. We hear the dialogue, see the things she sees without too much reflection and very little mysticism. This strikes me as a wise move, because by that point in the book, I needed a break from thinking too hard. It was nice to get a straightforward dose of scene, something fascinatingly interesting, yet at the same time as presented in scene form, it remained very present and accessible to me. I enjoyed just sitting back and watching the show. This let me catch my breath before hurtling into the thicker and thicker mix of narratives coming together at the end of the book.

All in all, Ehrlich pulls off a masterful collection of writing techniques to tell a compelling story.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stunning Memoir, December 15, 2007

By 

Story Circle Book Reviews - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning (Mass Market Paperback)

This stunning book is about a woman who was struck by a bolt from the blue and lived to learn from it--and to teach others what she has learned. As a story, the plot is simple: a woman is walking with her dogs on her Wyoming ranch when she is struck by lightning. Gravely, almost fatally injured, she begins a two-year battle back to health, helped by parents, friends, a doctor, and a dog.

But this almost surreal plot, compelling as it is, is not the most fascinating aspect of this quite remarkable book. What happens when you're struck by lightning? Here is how Ehrlich tells it:

"I woke in a pool of blood, lying on my stomach some distance from where I should have been, flung at an odd angle to one side of the dirt path. The whole sky had grown dark. Was it evening, and if so, which one? How many minutes or hours had elapsed since I lost consciousness, and where were the dogs? I tried to call out to them but my voice didn't work. The muscles in my throat were paralyzed and I couldn't swallow. Were the dogs dead? Everything was terribly wrong. I had trouble seeing, talking, breathing, and I couldn't move my legs or right arm. Nothing remained in my memory--no sounds, flashes, smells, no warnings of any kind...When thunder exploded over me, I knew I had been hit by lightning."

Erlich spent the next months on the brink of death, her nervous system seared almost beyond repair, trying to find a doctor who knew enough about the effects of electrocution to help her heal. That part of her search was facilitated by her parents, who took her to California and located an extraordinarily caring cardiologist who began to work with her. With his help, Ehrlich began to understand the physical consequences of a lighting strike. As a reader, I was fascinated with this aspect of her experience: what happens in the heart, in the brain, and throughout the body when millions of volts of electricity surge through the human system, short-circuiting the delicate human network. Her need to know became so strong that it later led her to witness open-heart surgery, to become a "traveler, a Marco Polo who had arrived in a place so exotic, few had seen it before."

In her effort to satisfy this compelling need to understand and explain, Ehrlich explores the phenomenon from all angles. She studies the thunderstorms "that keep the global circuits going." She talks with others who have been similarly injured and found a growing network of survivors. She attends a conference and listens to the stories of 65 others, many far more disabled than she, all committed to the need to share, to transform society's ignorance about the dangers of electrical shock. Afterward, she reflects on "those humans who had awakened after being hit and became shamans and healers, and wondered what this new life of mine would be, carved from a ruined body and a ruined marriage, and what special passageways I could hollow out as in a labyrinth of dead ends."

Lightning always follows the path of least resistance, Ehrlich says. It certainly struck her when she was most vulnerable. Separated and preparing for divorce, she was about to leave the ranch where she had lived for fifteen years. Her efforts to recover from the lightning strike took her to Santa Barbara. As she points out, it was an uncanny coincidence: the city is named for a woman whose murderer was struck by lightning, and who later became a saint, the protectress of those threatened by lightning and fire. With her was her dog Sam, who had also been struck, and whose devoted love carried her through the darkest hours of the next few years. "The role of supernatural helpers--guides, ferrymen, or harnessed dogs--stands for the guardian who carries the human spirit forward, whether from death back to life or the other way around....Sam is my guide, my Virgil through these never-ending gaps...that seem to lie before me."

Like those others who became "shamans and healers" after their lightning strike, Ehrlich comes to her own awakening, understanding and valuing in new ways the fragile but durable body in which we all live this human life. And for her, as for many of us, it is the writing process itself that becomes the vehicle for enlightenment. If you are looking for a story of true grace under fire, you must read this. It will show you how to go deeply into the experience without being swallowed by it, how to explore the pain without being consumed by it, and how to open the wound and see the beauty of it.

Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org